


Of Toasters and Fairytales

by Siria



Series: The One Where Ryan Aten't Dead [2]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 18:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16393160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: In which Shane experiences some post-astral projection complications of the Ryan Bergara kind.





	Of Toasters and Fairytales

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to "The Ghost of Ryan Present"; you'll probably need to read that for this to make sense. Thanks to trinityofone for betaing/shameless enabling.

It was all hurry-up-and-wait once they got to the hospital. Shane paced up and down in the hallway that lead to the ICU so often that he felt like he was channelling an expectant father-to-be from an old movie. 

"Can you just… stop? Please?" TJ said after a half hour or so. 

"No, nope," Shane said. "Sorry, buddy. Can't stop til I get my cigar."

Devon shot him a funny look but didn't ask him to explain, which was good. Shane felt that a person could grasp the side-effects of having the ol' bell rung, that the urge to drink even the shittiest alcohol in the aftermath of a severe shock was explicable. However—and this, he felt, was a reasonable size "however"—asking him to clarify to one co-worker that his palms were clammy because another co-worker had appeared to him in a manner that shook up his entire fucking phenomenological grasp of the universe and confessed feelings of the romantic variety for him, that wasn't possible right now. 

One and a half Styrofoam cups of coffee-adjacent hospital sludge later, a nurse appeared. He told them that the specialist had been by to check Ryan and was happy with his progress, but thought he likely had a few unpleasant days ahead of him. "Headaches, nausea, grogginess—unpleasant, but typical. Visits will be restricted until the symptoms recede, so I can only let one of you in for now, ten minutes max. Which of you will it be?"

Shane called dibs in a conversation conducted mostly via eyebrows and shoulder hitches. He tried to square his shoulders as he followed the nurse down the hallway. After all, if his grandma was to be believed, one of his great-great-uncles back in the old country had once kicked a Cossack in the nuts. It behoved Shane not to dishonour the bravery of the glorious Madej past.

"Through there," the nurse said, pointing at a door. "Ten minutes _max_ starting from now, I mean it."

Shane swallowed, wiped his hands on his pants, and pushed open the door.

Ryan looked a lot better than he had the last time Shane'd seen him, though admittedly that wouldn't have been hard. He still had a nasty black eye and a cut scabbing over on one temple, and his hair was matted and messy in a way that was not Bergara Standard Issue, but there was more colour in his cheeks and he stirred and looked over when he heard Shane come in. 

"Hey, man," Shane said, sidling over to the bed. He hated hospitals, and between that and the nerves, he uttered the kind of stupid question that always got asked of people in hospital beds. "You feeling okay?"

"Sore," Ryan admitted, voice cracking. 

Shane nodded. That made sense, couldn't argue with that one, and anyway most of his brain cells were preoccupied with strategising ways to begin the whole, "So you apparently astral projected into my hotel room or some shit and it turns out we mutually want to get all up on one another" conversation. 

Before he could say anything, Ryan continued, "Can't remember much, either, but the doc said it might all come back."

Shane stiffened. "Can't remember much of what?"

Ryan hitched a shoulder. "Anything between the time we packed up the cars in Villisca and when I woke up here."

"Nothing? You can't remember _anything_ ," Shane said, peering at Ryan. It wasn't like Ryan could lie for shit, but maybe this was the kind of situation where he was repressing all his usual tells. 

"Pretty classic case of retrograde amnesia, apparently," Ryan said. "Which makes me feel like I'm in a movie. You ever notice how it always seems like a cool idea, to have stuff happen to you just like in the movies, but whenever it does it inevitably sucks? I suppose everyone wants to be Jason Bourne, but no one wants to like, actually wake up buck naked with an implant in their hip."

"You can't remember _anything_?" Shane repeated. "Especially not anything occurring between, say, roughly 3 and 5 a.m. this morning?"

Ryan squinted up at him like Shane was the one who'd had the traumatic brain injury. "Are you asking me if I remember anything from… the period of time when I was lying unconscious in a hospital bed?"

"Scientific interest," Shane said. Distantly, he could feel his toes curling up in embarrassment at his own dumbassery. He was such an _idiot_. Of course it hadn't—Ryan hadn't—there was no possible way— "You know. Brains."

*****

So he saw a pen move. Let's face it, in the grand scheme of things, that wasn't the most compelling evidence that'd ever been put forward to assert the existence of… ghosts? Telepathic projection? Muggles spontaneously developing the ability to Apparate into hotel rooms in downtown Des Moines? (Shane may have only read the first five books, but he wasn't entirely a Philistine, thank you.) 

Later, waiting in the main hospital entrance for Ryan's mom to arrive from the airport, Shane spent some time googling. His heart wasn't in it, though. All he found was the usual grab-bag of internet crazy—whole sites written in turquoise and orange font on black backgrounds; numbers for psychic hotlines; news stories about this one woman from Ireland who'd married a three-hundred-year-old pirate ghost on a ship in international waters and was clearly surrounded by shameless enablers—and anyway, this didn't seem to be a case of mutual delusion. 

Any number of things could have made that pen move: a sudden draught, or the air-conditioning kicking in, or a big truck passing by outside. The rational thing for Shane to do would be to set it all to one side, accept that Ryan had not appeared in his hotel room and expressed the desire to jump Shane's bones, and just move on. 

Shane spent the rest of the week working to convince himself of that. TJ and Devon flew back to Los Angeles early the next night, but Shane volunteered to stay on an extra few days. He didn't have immediate family or work responsibilities—outside of trying to first manage, and then tactfully ignore, the fan response when news of the accident broke—and anyway, he told himself, _his_ mom would be upset if she found out that he'd left Mrs Bergara to manage things all alone. 

"Mom, I'm fine, I don't need to be fussed over," Ryan said on the third day, with a whine in his voice that said that despite the persistent amnesia, he had no trouble at all connecting with his twelve-year-old self. "Don't you want to go back to the hotel, take a nap or something? I mean Shane's here, he can call the doctor if one of my arms falls off, right?"

"Pinky swear," Shane said solemnly.

"You boys gave us such a fright," Mrs Bergara said, rummaging for something in her capacious handbag. "I'm going to fuss over you all I want." She emerged triumphant with a packet of wet wipes, and then reached across to ruffle Ryan's hair. 

"Mom, that's… cut it out, you're embarrassing me in front of Shane," Ryan said, shooting Shane a quick glance out of the corner of his eye. It was the briefest of looks, but Shane couldn't quite decipher it. He was pretty familiar with all of Ryan's expressions and their meanings by now, because dude had the world's worst poker face, but there was something about this one that didn't make Shane think of embarrassment. 

It made him think that Ryan wanted something. 

Shane mentally _la-la-la_ -ed the selfish, greedy little voice at the back of his mind that made some pretty lewd speculations about the kind of things that Ryan might want—the kind of things that Shane might make him need. It wasn't so bad when he was sitting in the Starbucks a couple of blocks from the hospital, triaging his email inbox and Facetiming with Devon to brainstorm schedule reshuffling, or when he went on Target runs to pick up something for Mrs Bergara. 

It was a little bit bad, though, when he was in Ryan's hospital room, and quite a _lot_ bad when it was just him and Ryan in Ryan's hospital room. Shane would have bet his student loan debt that Ryan really didn't remember anything about the accident or what came after—he was a terrible liar—but he was more squirrelly than usual, and every so often Shane caught Ryan _looking_ at him in a way that made the backs of Shane's knees sweat. 

Shane kept declaring that he needed more coffee and bolting from the room to avoid blurting out anything along the lines of, "I was so worried and sad and desperate I hallucinated your fucking not-ghost, buddy, and now whenever your mom plays with your hair I can't stop myself from thinking how much I want to be the one playing with it, and I've got the kissing equivalent of blue balls."

That just wouldn't be suave. 

Listen, Shane told himself firmly: this had all been nothing more than a transient case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Ryan had not manifested in a budget hotel in the capital city of Iowa. Shane had just been temporarily deranged, and if you put the emphasis on the 'temporarily', he was fine with that. If he'd hallucinated it all, he didn't have to ask himself any big metaphysical questions or embarrass himself by making a pass at a co-worker. Anyway, it was 2018—everyone was crazy now. 

It would have been so much easier just to wall all of that off, forget it with extreme prejudice, if Shane wasn't trapped in close quarters with a Ryan who _looked_ at him and no distractions other than their phones and a TV that only showed the local PBS station. Shane liked him a Ken Burns documentary just as much as the next white boy from the Midwest who'd almost majored in History, but he was starting to develop a weird Pavlovian tic where mournful fiddle music gave him a semi. 

(Sorry, Civil War dead.)

On the morning that Ryan was released from the hospital, Shane pushed his wheelchair across to the bank of elevators while Mrs Bergara went on ahead to hail a cab to take them to the airport. 

"I don't know why I can't just walk," Ryan grumbled. "I'm fine, I'm not some old man who can't take a few steps without falling over."

"You're just a lawsuit waiting to happen until we get you to the front door, Gramps," Shane said, pressing the elevator call button. "Then you can jump up from the chair and cry 'Freedom' all you want while you moonwalk to the car."

"Don't tempt me, I never want to set foot in this goddamned shithole ever again," Ryan said forcefully, right as the elevator door opened to reveal a woman with teased blonde hair and a shocked look on her face. "Uh, fuck—I mean, sorry, ma'am."

She pushed past them with her nose in the air, not acknowledging them even when Shane called after her, "You'll have to excuse him, he's a Californian with a head injury."

"Ugh, Jesus Christ," Ryan said as Shane got them both onto the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby. "I just want to get out of this place and go _home_. I've got cabin fever, dude. You can't tell me you're not feeling the same way."

Shane hitched a shoulder. He'd been staying in a hotel room eight days longer than planned. "It's going to feel good to get back to my place. Think I'm going to need a sesh communing with a good book and a beer on my very own couch."

"Exactly," Ryan said as the elevator dinged and the door slid open. "Your own couch, so important."

"Home to my own ass divot," Shane said solemnly. "Can't go too long without it."

"And _decent_ beer," Ryan said as Shane steered them down the hallway towards the main doors. "You spent a long fucking time in that hotel with nothing but shitty $17 mini-bar drinks for company."

Shane walked the rest of the way on autopilot, and helped Ryan and his mom into the cab while his brain pinged wildly between white noise and frantic babbling. _Did he just— but it could be a coincidence— lots of hotels have mini-bars— but $17 is an awfully precise number to arrive at— but maybe Teej or Devon said something before they flew back— but for God's sake, Madej, why would they be making small talk with their injured co-worker about the price of hotel hooch?_

Christ on a bike, had it all actually happened?

Shane made it all the way from Des Moines to Denver without being precisely conscious of how. Halfway through their layover, Ryan squinted up at him and said, "You okay? You're being awfully quiet."

"Altitude," Shane said, finding that he suddenly couldn't quite keep eye contact with Ryan. "You know. Height. The Rockies. Sasquatch. Whoosh."

Or, apparently, construct a sentence in the English language. 

Shane spent most of his time in seat 27D from DEN to LAX staring at the back of Ryan's head five rows ahead of him and wondering what the neurological outcome of a low-key relationship crisis and a major metaphysical one was likely to be. Not great, probably. 

Still, things could be worse. The guy in 27E passed the flight telling the woman trapped in 27F about how he was moving to LA to undergo next-level Scientology training and kick-start his Hollywood career. 

At least Shane wasn't the saddest poor bastard on the plane.

*****

Shane spent the weekend reacquainting himself with his couch ass divot and with his cat, and uploaded several videos of said cat to Instagram to both placate his followers and distract them from asking yet more questions about the accident. It worked, mostly. Sure, there were still some people who were invested in a weird conspiracy theory about how Shane and Ryan had been abducted and replaced by doubles ("Just like Avril Lavigne!!! Look their ears don't even match any more!!!" Shane wasn't even going to ask.), but Obi's magic was pretty potent. 

( _Boop that nose #boopit #booooopit #catsofinstagram #furbulous_

 _His fave song on the Mamma Mia soundtrack #herewegoagain #thewholesomecontentyoucrave #catsofinstagram_ )

Obi didn't have much advice for what Shane should do about the whole Ryan Situation, but frankly Obi seemed to lack sympathy about most of Shane's life dilemmas. 

"Why do I even ask you these things in the first place? You shit in a box."

"Meow," Obi said. 

"Rude," Shane said.

A weekend of Netflix and Decidedly Less Than Chill left Shane no closer to figuring out whether or not Ryan really had astrally projected himself across several city blocks, but he had decided on one thing: there was no point in him just sitting around and agonising over this endlessly. Was it a little terrifying, thinking about walking up to Ryan and taking a breath and saying, "I _like_ like you, and I would like to date you"? Yes. And in many ways, Shane had arranged his life—his friendships, his relationships, his career—around not having to take risks like this.

But he was, just maybe, at the point of thinking that not knowing for sure would be worse than never letting himself want.

"Time to defecate or arise from the chamber pot," he murmured to himself as he got dressed on Monday morning. 

"You can do this," he said as he pulled into the BuzzFeed parking lot. 

"Nope, no, you can't do this," Shane said under his breath when he walked over to their desks and saw Ryan sitting beneath a handmade banner that read _Glad You Didn't Die in a State with **Way** More Pigs Than People!_ Banner aside, this was a sight Shane had grown used to: walking in at the start of a new week to find Ryan waiting for him, tired and caffeinated and full of fifteen different ideas at once. If he said something based on nothing more than wishful thinking, he risked fucking up what they had going so badly that BuzzFeed would fire him and then what was he good for, except maybe working as a fifth Try Guy?

(But no one wanted to be the _fifth_ Try Guy. That would be like trying to be the fifth Beatle, only with more partial nudity.)

Shane wavered back and forth all Monday: say something. Don't. Just 'fess up! Pretend you saw an interesting pigeon in the window and are required to go investigate it, no, you weren't about to say something. 

Tuesday, he got up, shaved, looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and then slapped himself in the face—just once, and with just enough force to make sure he was paying attention. "Today, self! It doesn't have to be smooth, it just has to be said."

He brought Ryan his favourite weird do-you-even-lift-bro smoothie (beets, lemongrass, and acai berries, why) and a banana muffin, and then did an abrupt about-face and spent the next two hours letting Curly apply pore-cleansing strips to his face on camera. 

Wednesday, he swore off saying anything at all. 

Thursday, he tried to say something when it was just him and Ryan alone in the break room trying to get the coffee machine to play ball. Shane got as far as saying, "So I was thinking—" when Jen walked in and startled him so badly that he choked on his own spit and she actually did the Heimlich on him. 

(Which hurt like you wouldn't believe, because she had a mean right fist on her, but which actually left Shane feeling weirdly reassured that Jen would look out for him if he ever did have a choking-related emergency.)

Friday, he was just about to suggest "Lunch but maybe, uh… not… here?" when Ryan said, "Hey, big guy, can I talk to you about something?"

"Sure," Shane said slowly, because that squirrelly look was back on Ryan's face, and that boded. That was the kind of look that had in the past resulted in Shane spending the night on a bridge in Texas looking for its non-existent goat demon lease-holder. (Jesus, Texas had problems.)

Ryan led him upstairs to the set where they filmed most of the Unsolved bits, and closed the door behind them with a sigh. "Okay," he said, scratching at his cheek where patchy beard wasn't quite hiding the yellowing bruises. "I guess there's no, like, easy way to bring something like this up and I want you to know that there's no obligation here, you shouldn't feel like you _have_ to, if you don't _want_ to—"

"This is—just so you know, this is fucking ominous, buddy—"

Ryan rolled his eyes. "I'm trying, okay, but this is not my forte or anything—"

"No, you're merely paid cash money to talk at people for a living." If this was Ryan working up to, like, ask him to go back to the Sallie House and spend a week or something camping out in the middle of someone's money-grubbing delusions or something equally as nuts… well, Shane would grumble but he'd probably go along with it. He was a sucker like that. 

"Would you just—can you just shut the fuck up for a moment?" Ryan said. "I'm trying to do a thing here."

"By all means," Shane said, spreading his arms wide. "Do the thing."

"Stop being a buttface when I'm trying to tell you that I like you, buttface."

Shane felt his face do something elastic and improbable. "What?"

Ryan folded his arms and fixed his gaze on the floor for a long moment, before squaring his shoulders and lifting his chin. There he was: Ryan Bergara, the Brave Little Toaster. "I've been thinking about things a lot, and I know that's kind of a near-death experience cliché, but whatever. If that had been it for me, I would have, you know, I'd have gone with a lot of regrets. And you would have been one of them. So: Shane Madej, I _like_ like you and I would like to take you on a date this weekend. Please. And thank you."

"But—no," Shane blurted out. "You can't say that."

Ryan flinched, blanched, making the bruises on his face stand out. "I—okay. Well. That's, I mean it, you don't have to pretend anything you don't f—"

Before he could turn to go, Shane reached out and grabbed him by the shirt sleeve. "No, you—you _nerd_. I mean you can't say that because I had dibs on saying it first. What the fuck do you think I've been trying to work up the nerve to say to you all week? _You_ almost died on _me_ , and I barely even realised it then, but—"

"Holy shit." Ryan stared up at him, wide-eyed. 

"—now you fucking beat me to laying it all on the line just because you had to be a toaster even though I'm the one who's in love with you?"

"Okay, nothing about this month is going the way I expected," Ryan said faintly. 

"Argh," Shane said, because communication was important. 

"Just. Okay. Right. Recalibrating. Let me try a thing," Ryan said. He took a step closer, and then another one, and then he was right up in Shane's space in a way that gave Shane a bad case of the dry mouth, and maybe a mild one of the collywobbles, but definitely no heebie-jeebies. 

"I mean, if you want," Shane said. Ryan's hands were on his waist, his hips. He closed his eyes. "No big. No pressure. We cool."

"You're a fucking lunatic," Ryan said, and kissed him. 

It was the smallest and sweetest kiss Shane had had in a long time, and oh shit, this was for sure a feelings kiss. This was a kiss that was slow and careful because every touch, every shift of Ryan's mouth against his felt significant and weighty and so much more than Shane deserved. And Shane couldn't help it: he pressed forward, wrapping his arms around Ryan and pulling him close, trying to touch him everywhere at once. There was so much Shane wanted to be certain about—what it felt like to cup Ryan's shoulder-blades in his hands, the rasp of Ryan's stubble against his fingertips, the noises Ryan could make when Shane scratched blunt fingernails against his scalp. He wanted it so much, all at once, overwhelmed, he wanted to, just, everything, right there, and he nipped at the corner of Ryan's jaw—

Ryan pulled back, eyes wide; his hands trembled against Shane's chest. "Holy shit, I remember."

It took Shane a moment to stop thinking about Ryan's mouth for long enough to be able to track that. "You—"

"It hurt, and then it stopped hurting, and that was… pretty fucking terrifying, actually. I couldn't move or speak or open my eyes, like the world's worst fucking case of sleep paralysis, but then I just knew, somehow, that I could find you anyway and everything would work itself out. Oh my god, I _remember_ it, my brain is melting, this is great."

"You remember," Shane said slowly. "You remember what, exactly?"

"Being in that hotel room with you. Trying to get you to listen to me, and you are fucking stubborn when you're drunk, you know that?" Ryan said, and Shane stopped breathing entirely for at least a solid minute. His head swam. "You threw a bottle _through_ my incorporeal self, that's, Miss Manners would have something to say about that."

"You were there," Shane said again, helplessly. 

"I was, I—holy shit, dude, I walked around outside my own body! I found a mystery I didn't even know needed solving!" Ryan's expression shifted from a shocked grin to one of outrage. "Wait, you said you were 'at least sixty per cent in love' with me? What the fuck does that even mean? I could've been legit dead for all you knew, and you couldn't even round up to a full two-thirds?"

Shane blinked, "I… what?"

"Clearly I was at least slightly alive and not all dead," Ryan continued, poking Shane in the chest with a surprisingly bony finger. Ow. "But who does that when they've got a maybe-ghost standing in front of them? What kind of big confession was that?"

"It was the confession of someone who thought he was having a stroke and didn't realise you were you! Jesus Christ! This is the kind of thing you want to focus on, really?"

"I am working through a lot of amnesia-aftermath shit right now," Ryan said. "So if you could maybe be like, a little supportive, that'd be awesome." He stared off into the middle distance, eyes widening. "Holy shit, that U-Haul driver was really irresponsible. We could have _died_."

Shane couldn't help the noise he made at that, or stop himself from touching Ryan again: touching his shoulders, his arms, curving his shaking fingers around Ryan's jaw—so careful of the bruises—and then up behind his ears to bury them in his hair. Ryan was warm against him, vital and alive, and it struck Shane all over again just how close he'd come to losing him. "Ryan."

"And nothing on tape, so no proof, but if—oh man, wait, I've got it—"

"Ryan."

"What?"

"I'm really glad you figured out how to come find me." Shane cleared his throat, closed his eyes. "But I'm pretty sure I'm a full one hundred per cent in love with you, so if you could plan on not even part-dying again any time soon, I would appreciate that. A lot."

"Thank you for those words," Ryan said. He had _that_ grin on his face, Shane was sure of it: the one he sported when he was about to present some cracked-out Theory 3 that he was convinced was right and that he knew would drive Shane crazy. "I like 'em a lot, and they're truthful words, and right back atcha, but I knew that already. Want to know how?"

"I don't know how I can want to fervently say both yes and no at the same time," Shane said, opening one eye, "But lay it on me."

"Well for one thing, you're Shane Madej, secret marshmallow, and you're not even as smooth as you think you are," Ryan said, in a tone that would have left Shane feeling affronted if he hadn't been so distracted by how Ryan was leaning closer into him. "But for another thing, isn't it obvious how I got my memory back?"

Shane shook his head and opened the other eye. "I mean literally nothing about this makes sense. Nothing. So: no."

Ryan grinned. "True love's kiss, baby."

"That is a _fairytale concept_ ," Shane said in tones of great scandal. "You can't go applying fairytale concepts to brains, that completely undermines the scientific method. That's not how neurons work."

"Is too!" Ryan shot back. 

"Do you even know how a neuron works?"

"I'm pretty sure I know how kissing works," Ryan said. "And I know I kissed you and boom, that cleared up a lingering case of the ole amnesia in two seconds flat. Not sure how else you'd classify that except as true love's kiss."

"That wasn't even my best attempt!" Shane was appalled. "True love's kiss, _if it existed_ , wouldn't be some two seconds flat kind of deal, not coming from me. You'd be wooed, Ryan Bergara. There'd be swooning! You'd have little cartoon hearts and Disney songbirds over your head."

"You talk a big game," Ryan said. He was smiling, and he loved Shane, and there was some little homunculus or other doing backflips of joy right the way through Shane's hindbrain. Shane had no clue what was going on, but he was willing to bet this was what being twitterpated felt like. "But I don't know if you can top that one. That was a brain-changer, you don't experience one of those every day."

"Oh yeah?" Shane murmured, leaning closer. "You willing to let me try?"

"Eh, I bet I could be convinced," Ryan said, right before Shane got to work on what he was hoping would make the Top 5 list, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> True fact: there are approximately seven times as many pigs as there are people in the state of Iowa.


End file.
